Thursday, March 29, 2012

There is a tendency for people with an interest in improving databases performance to imagine that it mostly boils down to factors outside of their application - the hardware, operating system configuration, and database settings. While these are obviously crucially important, experience suggests that in most cases, by far the largest gains are to be had by optimising the application’s interaction with the database. Doing so invariably involves analysing what queries are being executed in production, their costs, and what the significance of the query is to the application or business process that the database supports.

PostgreSQL has had a module available in contrib since version 8.4 - pg_stat_statements, originally developed by Takahiro Itagaki. The module blames execution costs on queries, so that bottlenecks in production can be isolated to points in the application. It does so by providing a view that is continually updated, giving real-time statistical information. Here is an example from the Postgres 9.2 docs: